A review by sophiaforever
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

adventurous emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. The plot is that humanity reached for the stars but got marooned on a tidally locked planet, January. There's some neat descriptions of the planet like how the main city was built between two giant mountains the terminator so one mountain protects them from the heat of the sun and the other prevents gusts of wind from freezing everyone. There's an ocean where you can stand on your boat and without moving if you look nightward you can see it freeze and towards the day you can see it boil. Lots of little neat things like that. 
 
And from a technical aspect, she does some really interesting things that help you put yourself in the story. One of the things she brings up is that without any day/night cycle, everyone begins having trouble not only regulating their sleep/wake cycle, but just knowing what time it is. And so she completely removes any mention of units of time that we would recognize from her story. Days or weeks can pass in a single paragraph but you have no idea you just have to kinda guess how long it's been. From beginning to end, at minimum it's been a year our time but at most? It could easily have been five to ten years and possibly more based on how long it takes to do certain things 
(multiple people completely recover from major injuries and surgeries for instance)
.
 
The book is also split between two POV characters, Mouth and Sophie. Mouth's chapters are written 3rd person ("Mouth went over there, then went over there.") whereas Sophie's are written 2nd person ("I go over here, then I go over here."). I thought it would bug me more than it does but you get used to it pretty quickly.

But even all of that considered, I'm still not in love with the book. I think it's because the author is focusing more on the aspects of the world that I don't find really interesting. I fully acknowledge that the problem is with me so I don't want to give it a BAD review when I can tell it's a good book it's just not to my tastes. The time-ambiguousness of it is disorienting which I get is the point but it also damages my enjoyment of the book. One of the characters has a lot going on but because that stuff isn't relevant to Sophie, you don't actually get to know much about it. Kinda like if you read a story about Jimmy Olson at the Daily Planet and Jimmy knows Clark Kent is Superman but because only Clark's journalism career is relevant to Jimmy's story you don't ever get to see any superman stuff.

In the end, I just didn't love it, but I don't want to give a bad review because it's more about me just wanting something else rather than it being bad.
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